As part of Little Tokyo Design Week, a recently successful event hosted by Los Angeles, offices deegan day design and Open A of Japan curated an exhibition of 40 houses from Japan and California. The goal was to highlight 20 Japanese and 20 Californian architectural practices that explore new efficiencies of scale, construction and reduced ecological impact, posing innovative possibilities for the future of small-scale residential design. They had many exciting architects participate in this exhibition, such as, Neil Denari, Greg Lynn, Wes Jones, Sou Fujimoto, Makoto Tanijiri, Mt Fuji Architects just to name a few.

Van Alen Institute, a New York-based organization dedicated to projects in public architecture, is joining the U.S. National Park Service to launch Parks for the People: A Student Competition to Reimagine America’s National Parks. Students and faculty will have a once-in-a-generation chance to creatively rethink our national parks’ connections to people, and their role as revered natural, social, and cultural destinations through design studios focusing on one of seven national parks. More information on the competition after the break.

STREET WORKS, an initiative of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA NSW), is a competition to create temporary installations that transform under-utilised public spaces into vibrant places. An exhibition of the 67 entries they received from landscape architects, architects, artists & designers from 8 countries is now on at Customs House in Sydney.

Designing in Lima, a city of marked eclecticism is more a provocation than a challenge. The vibrant movement of forms, heights, colors, reflections, textures and all kinds of elements competing for the leading role is a particularly interesting framework for XTe a+d‘s proposal for an exclusive, loft apartment building. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The Architecture Foundation is pleased to be running a new open and international competition that calls on design teams to submit proposals for urban beehives, bird/bat-boxes and planters.

The competition is being organized by The AF on behalf of inmidtown, the business improvement district for the central London areas of Holborn, Bloomsbury and St. Giles. The competition calls for submissions that offer distinctive yet functional designs that help enhance biodiversity in this urban context. It is envisaged that the winning proposals will be mass-produced and installed in a variety of sites across the inmidtown area. More information on the competition after the break.

Fundraising is now underway for a $23.9 million green makeover of Richardson Memorial Hall, the century old home of the Tulane University School of Architecture.

The renovation will include maximizing the light and airiness of the building, installing solar panels and cisterns to collect rainwater for irrigation and, possibly, plumbing use, and many other sustainable strategies. Additionally, IBM Smart Building technology will monitor and adjust the building’s water consumption, lighting and other systems to optimize their performance while lowering the building’s carbon footprint. More information on the project after the break.

The recipients of the Good Design Award 2011 were recently announced. Both yotsuya tenera and ReNOA Motosumiyoshi won the award for their design of an apartment house and the renovation of complex housing respectively. More information on both projects after the break.

Following their success in winning first prize in an international competition, the architects von Gerkan, Marg and Partners (gmp) have been commissioned to realize a tower block complex of ten buildings in Nanjing. The design by gmp is for a financial enterprise center on a site of about 80,000 square meters in this large eastern Chinese metropolis. The above ground gross floor space of the 120 to 200 meter high tower blocks will be about 500,000 square meters. More images and architects’ description after the break.

An additional music room or a performance hall for schools, a pleasant social space for residential apartments or a self-sufficient housing for the homeless. The “Bird’s Nest”, designed by Onat Öktem, Ziya Imren and Zeynep Öktem, can adopt itself both in content and in size to where it “perches”. By placing two-meter long units side by side, the “Bird Nest” can be elongated to the desired dimensions. Their concept was selected as Special Mention: Director’s Choice for the 2011 d3 Natural Systems international architectural design competition. More images and project description after the break.

The 2011 Curry Stone Design Prize Winners were recently announced with an official presentation ceremony to follow on November 7th at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Hsieh Ying-Chun is the Grand Prize Winner; he will receive $100,000 from the foundation with no strings attached. Hsieh is a leading Taiwanese architect who for over a decade has deployed his talents in rural areas decimated by natural disaster. Hsieh works throughout Asia, training villagers to build locally appropriate dwellings in response to devastation such as the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Two additional 2011 Winner Prizes, of $10,000 each, will be awarded to Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée (AAA) and FrontlineSMS. More information on the prize winners after the break.

The architecture of the Museum of Fromelles, designed by SERERO Architectes, is aiming at establishing a link between sky and earth, between visitors and the “burial” of soldiers. This is a building with a low profile, which is half-sunk on its northeast facade. The work on natural topography has helped to improve the natural slope of the site and cover, partially, the technical space of the museum. More images and architects’ description after the break.

On October 18th, starting at 7pm, Storefront for Art and Architecture presents Kissing vs Komplex, a Productive Disagreement Series Event with Sylvia Lavin and Hal Foster on conversation about contemporary relations between art and architecture, and the forces that bring them together.

’1K house’ was a design studio in the Department of Architecture, MIT in 2009 co-taught by Professor Yung Ho Chang, Chairman of Department of Architecture, MIT, Professor Tony Ciochetti, Chairman of Center for Real Estate, MIT, and Professor Dennis Shelden, Department of Architecture, MIT. It is a project designed for the rural poor in the earthquake area, Sichuan, China who lost their home during the seismic disaster in 2008. The Pinwheel house is the selected project to be built in China and it became the first built project, by architect, Ying chee Chui, an MArch’11 student at MIT, in summer 2010.

As MIT’s first low cost housing prototype, this project set the stage for the importance of low-cost developments for locations around the globe that have had natural disasters that are beyond society’s control. By reaching out, architects everywhere can take advantage of opportunities such as theses to help a society recover and rebuild. More information on the project after the break.

Architecture, in its most idealistic sense, is always geared towards the construction of the public good. Thus, the notion of architecture pro bono appears as a redundant affirmation. However, the real meaning lying behind the beautiful latinism of pro bono, is the contemporary capitalist counterpart and less exotic “for free” and more precisely, for free for those who are unable to afford it.

Highlight Gallery recently announced that they will be featuring two artists whose bodies of work are influenced by architecture, Filip Dujardin and Renato Nicolodi. Their work, which will be up from November 3rd to December 12th, reflects the passion and interest which Highlight Gallery founder and curator Amir Mortazavi cultivates for architecture. With these two artists, the answer to the eternal question, ‘Is architecture art?’ is easy to find. More information on the event and their work after the break.

HAO (Holm Architecture Office), along with five other New York design offices, have been invited to participate in the re-design of the Coleman Oval Skate Park and the master planning of the Coleman Oval Park. The competition is sponsored by Architecture for Humanity.

The Coleman Oval Park, situated partly under the Manhattan Bridge, has long suffered from lack of exposure, little upkeep, and the “off the beaten path” factor. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Serie Architects has been awarded first prize by the competition Technical Committee for the Wuxi Xishan Civic Centre in China. Serie saw off strong competition from a high-powered international shortlist which included NihonSekkei, GMP Architekten, AS Architecture-Studio, and Arte Charpentier.

The scheme is oriented around a large public plaza which is intended to form the centre of public life and expression within the Civic Centre. This unadorned open space hosts public gatherings and events, government displays and temporary exhibitions. The importance of symmetry within the composition of the plan is expressed in the strong axial relationship to the main entrance. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The Taiwan Tower, designed by STL Architects, will act as a monumental building that will frame the new center and provide the entire city with a renewed and iconic identity, such as Eiffel Tower in Paris or The Sydney Opera House. Iconography achieved by challenging the forces of nature, designing an urban symbol, to strengthen people’s feeling of identity towards their city. Twisting the conventional idea of a tower and tilting the complex structure to contextualize the building in a technological era. The importance of symbols to civilization and architecture for people to feel identified with a place by means of an icon. More images and architects’ description after the break.